Friday, May 14, 2010

Raising the threshold to 55% for confidence votes is all very well, but what about budget votes? A government which can't pass its budget surely has to be considered to have fallen. And I don't think anyone has got the brass balls to propose a similar reform suggesting that a Finance Bill can be deemed to have passed if it has 45% support. So what this proposal achieves is to give the Opposition an incentive to make explicit use of the previously implicit fact that every budget is a de facto confidence vote. Doesn't that just scream "stability and viability" to you?